Self-enrollment

[SheilaZickefoos]

I am an admin for my company's Canvas instance. We have used SIS import to add students to the LMS. All courses we have offered to this point have been recruiting cohorts and manually adding the students to the faciliated course. However, we now are ready to release self-paced courses and would like those to be self-enroll. We have published an enrollment link for folks and have found that when folks go to "enroll" the system tells them their email address is already in use (due to the SIS import). I have not been able to figure out a way around this, is there a way we can open up self-enrollment in Canvas?

[mzimmerman]

Hi @SheilaZickefoos 

Be sure that what you have allowed is "Self-Enrollment" NOT "Open Registration" or "Self Registration" 

Self-Enrollment allows the individual course settings to be set so that users who are logged into Canvas can enroll themselves.  See https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-enable-self-enrollment-in-an-account-and-all... 

By default, users must already have an account and be logged into Canvas to self-enroll.

Open Registration allows instructors to add users to a course who do do not already have Canvas accounts: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-enable-open-registration-in-an-account-and-a... 

Open Registration allows users to create their own Canvas accounts: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-configure-self-registration-through-Canvas/t... 

[SheilaZickefoos]

Thank you!! I do have self-enrollment set up.

This makes sense. So, even though we imported the folks to the system. They have to be signed-in to Canvas to self-enroll. We did not create passwords for them. I'm thinking that for the first canvas course they participate in, I will need to "enroll them" in the course so they get an invite where they can set up their password. Would I be correct in that?

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @SheilaZickefoos 

What you're describing with the invitation that includes a password setup only occurs when instructors are adding new users to system at the same time that they are adding them to the course (Open Registration).  

Enrolling existing users in a course would result in them being sent an invitation to join the course, but would not send them a link to set their password. 

Generally speaking, users or enrollments created via SIS Import do not result in any kind of invitation being sent to the user.  The only time that a user will be sent an invitation to set their password after having their account created via SIS Import is if the "canvas_password_notification" value is set to "y" in the user feeds file.  See the various password options shown in the "Users.csv" section of https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.sis_csv.html 

If users are supposed to use a local Canvas login (as opposed to an SSO), you probably want to be sure that the "authentication_provider_id" value is "canvas" in the feed file, or else I believe that Canvas assumes that a blank/empty password in the feed file implies that the password is coming from an SSO.